Meet Tessa
A Trawden Athletic Club runner taking on 59 to 60 miles of Rossendale hills in one continuous push, most of it in the dark, for a mountain rescue team that never asks anyone for a penny at the point of need.
Tessa at a glance
- Runner
- Tessa, Trawden Athletic Club
- Challenge
- 59 to 60 miles on foot, non stop
- Date
- 5 to 6 September 2026
- Start
- 6:00pm on Saturday 5 September 2026
- Where
- Limey Lane and Marl Pits, Rossendale, Lancashire
- Raising money for
- Rossendale and Pendle Mountain Rescue Team
- Target
- £10,000
Sixty miles, one night, one valley
Most people who take on an ultramarathon travel to it. Tessa is doing hers at home, on the paths she trains on, in front of the people who will be watching for her head torch coming back down the hill.
The challenge is built from the two routes of the Rossendale Round the Hills Walk, the community walk that has crossed these hills every year since 1966. Tessa runs three laps of the 14 mile loop through the night, then joins the 18 mile main route at dawn with everyone else. Three loops plus the big route comes to 59 to 60 miles.
Running with Trawden Athletic Club
Tessa runs with Trawden Athletic Club, a club based in Pendle in East Lancashire that has been voted England Athletics North West Club of the Year. Trawden is the sort of club that takes people who thought they were not runners and, a few years later, finds them signing up to things like this.
Anyone who has run with a club knows that the club is half the reason the hard sessions get done. The early starts, the winter hill reps and the long Sunday miles behind this challenge were not done alone.
What 60 miles actually asks of a person
Sixty miles is roughly two and a half marathons back to back, over Pennine terrain, with the climbs that come with it. The projected finish time of 19 to 20 hours means Tessa expects to be moving through the whole of a September night: roughly nine hours of it in full darkness, navigating by head torch, on ground that is rough enough in daylight.
Sleep deprivation does strange things at that distance. So does cold, and rain, and the second half of the third lap at four in the morning when there is nobody about and the only reason to keep going is that somebody said they would.
That somebody is you, if you donate.
Why mountain rescue
Rossendale and Pendle Mountain Rescue Team covers around 350 square miles of East Lancashire, including Pendle Hill and the Rossendale valley. The team is made up entirely of volunteers and it is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. They receive no routine government funding for their day to day running costs.
When somebody breaks an ankle on Pendle in the dark, or a walker with dementia goes missing on a winter afternoon, it is these unpaid people who go out. Running 60 miles through one night is a way of saying that out loud.
